NEW Series : Introducing Affiliate Networks – Addiliate.Com

Affiliate Networks are one of the “key components” of the affiliate industry puzzle. Having good relationships with a few of them is absolutely crucial. Sure, you can focus on working directly with the advertisers, but at some point you will need to work with affiliate networks too, whether you like it or not. To read more on this topic, check my article about Affiliate Networks.

WHAT DO I WANT TO ACHIEVE HERE?

Many new affiliates are facing problems when trying to join their first few networks, their applications get rejected pretty often. On top of that, as a new affiliate, you never know who you can trust and what network is known for pulling stunts on their affiliates.

That’s why I decided to start something like a series, let’s call it “Introducing Affiliate Networks”. The purpose of this series is not to introduce just my favorite networks, or those that I currently work with. What I want to achieve here, is to give some exposure to affiliate networks, that are known for being solid and are generally considered honest operations, by the affiliate crowd.

So even thou I cannot make any guarantees, since that is not possible, I will not list any network that is known for fucking their affiliates over. And trust me, all the bad news find their way to “my ears”, one way or another 🙂 It’s in nobody’s interest to work with inexperienced networks that can bite the dust within a few months either, so I will put more emphasis on networks that have been around for a while.

To make it more interesting, I will require that any network I write about on my blog, offers something EXTRA for my readers – signup bonus, fast approval … something like that.

LET’S START WITH THE 1ST NETWORK – ADDILIATE.COM

I’ve known Christoph for a while, from his posts on the STM Forum, where he hangs out pretty often. He is actually one of the more active affiliate network owners/managers on the forum … one more reason to join STM, many affiliate managers are frequent users, which makes it easy to contact them.

The decision to finally start with this Affiliate Network series actually came from my latest conversation with Christoph, he kinda persuaded me to start with it. The breaking point was when he offered to instantly approve any readers of my blog that apply to join Addiliate … this was something I thought the new affiliates might appreciate. That’s why his network is the first one I’m writing about on the blog.

In order to get priority approval, just mention my nickname somewhere on the signup form (Matuloo or Matej). You can also just click this link : https://www.addiliate.com/redirect.html?ad=METFLJ26 that has a code in it that will tell them you come from this blog. I know how affiliates feel about referral links so feel free to go to https://www.addiliate.com/ directly, just let them know you come from my blog in order to get accepted quickly… or don’t, it’s up to you 🙂

I sent a couple of questions to Christoph, so let me present his answers to you now, I believe his answers will clearly demonstrate who you are dealing with at Addiliate.Com :

1. Hello Christoph, please give me some basics about Addiliate.Com, so my readers know who they are dealing with. (How many owners, whether you’re one of them, when did you found addiliate, how many employees you have, where are you located…)

Addiliate was founded in March 2010 and is a global affiliate network with campaigns in all verticals you can imagine. The verticals we mainly work in are app installs, sweepstakes, e-commerce campaigns, software, free trials, astro, travel, dating, gaming, browser extensions and finance & insurance campaigns. Our campaigns can be run a global scale on both incent and non-incent traffic, on mobile and desktop. The company was founded by Bart van Mill and myself and we are now a team of 20 affiliate professionals who mostly are industry veterans & experts. Our office is located in sunny Barcelona which gives it of course an extra advantage!

2. What did you guys do before you actually started Addiliate, have you been running affiliate campaigns yourself? And what were the reasons to actually start an affiliate network?

Before Bart and I founded Addiliate, we were working on the advertiser side in the affiliate team of Vistaprint focusing on the Benelux markets since Bart is from The Netherlands and I am from Belgium. We were buying insane amounts of traffic for Vistaprint (many millions of $$$ a quarter) and quickly got in touch with big publishers. They loved us because we dropped big CPMs for their traffic and were always hungry to buy more and more from them. At one point we started getting calls from various advertisers, asking us if they could also buy traffic from us. We had to decline this many times because Vistaprint doesn’t sell any traffic on an affiliate basis. Hence, we saw the opportunity to leverage our publisher network and the ever increasing need for advertisers to buy more traffic on a performance basis. That is how one day, in between a few beers, we decided to give it a go, and start Addiliate. It has been a very rewarding experience and we’ve been growing strongly over the course of the last 6.5 years because our focus is on putting the affiliate first – if our affiliates are successful, we are successful. This has been the core of our strategy.

3. What kind of a network is Addiliate, do you cover a wide range of verticals, or are you focused on a particular vertical that you want to dominate?

We are a general network focused on CPI, CPL and CPA campaigns. Since we have more than 12,000 affiliates in our network we need to offer them a wide variety of campaigns in terms of different verticals and countries we work in. Every affiliate is different and is looking for a different type of campaign, we try to accommodate this by offering +800 campaigns. What is very important for us is to work in direct with the advertiser so we can offer our affiliates with a very competitive payout. We are not interested in rebrokering offers as this doesn’t add value for our affiliates. Our affiliates come on the first place so we want to offer them with superhigh payouts, weekly payments (every wednesday), and exclusive landers and campaigns. Our ambition is not to dominate in a single vertical but rather to dominate with the highest possible payout there is in the market for every campaign we work with.

4. How many offers do you have available right now roughly, across how many verticals?

We now have around 800 campaigns live in more than 50 countries, and we are adding new campaigns on a daily basis in the following verticals: app installs, astro, dating, education, finance & insurance, free products/trials, gambling, gaming, health & beauty, home & energy, mobile content, software downloads, sweepstakes and travel.

5. Many affiliates are wondering about the margins of affiliate networks, can you shed some light on the topic or is this considered a business secret. How much $$$ have you paid out to affiliates so far? 🙂

The golden days whereby a network could take a 30-35% cut are definitely over as there is a lot of competition between networks and, also affiliates are getting smarter and smarter which is a good thing for the industry in itself. The shifting cost for an affiliate to shift its traffic from one network to another are tiny. I think an honest bottom line margin for the network should be around 10-15% as there are many advantages for affiliates to work with a network rather than direct with the advertiser. Many people think its always best to work direct, but that’s not true. Working with a tier 1 affiliate network like Addiliate certainly has advantages:

– We pay our affiliates EVERY single Wednesday so you don’t have to worry about cashflow at all. Advertisers pay net30/45/60 or some even later, so we are advancing the cash to our affiliates.

– You have a single point of contact rather than having to work with many different account managers inside the complex maze of an advertisers’ organization. Every affiliate gets ONE dedicated account manager

– Regular presents and rewards. We give a lot of extras to our affiliates once they hit certain revenue targets. I lost count on all the iPhones and iPads we gave away to our affiliates, and we still get a smile on our face every time we ship a present to one of our affiliates!

– Premium technology. We started building our own platform Addiliate in 2013 to customize it and adapt it to the very specific needs of affiliates: Real live tracking, API integration, fast campaign or C2S/S2S pixel set up, integration with voluum/cake/hasoffers/etc, fast campaign approvals, automatic payments,… These are all crucial advantages for affiliates that tier 1 affiliate networks can offer but you would be surprised how many advertisers don’t have all these features available for their affiliates.

6. I personally have 2 main reasons for using affiliate networks, one is the wide range of offers to choose form, the second one is certain level of protection in terms of getting paid in case of disputes. What is your policy on paying your affiliates when advertisers complain about quality or refuse to pay?

Regarding payments, we wouldn’t be in business for more than six and a half years if we didn’t pay our affiliates. Our policy is simple and clear. We always, always, always pay our affiliates! The only exception to this is if an affiliate starts sending intentional fraud or bot traffic to our campaigns. Our policy is to work in a correct, honest and just way with our affiliates. Good affiliates will always get paid, no matter what. Fraudsters won’t get paid and will get kicked out of the system. Its really as simple as that.

Regarding offering a wide range of offers to choose from, this is a key pillar of our strategy. Every affiliate is unique and specialized in a certain type of campaigns – therefore we have +800 global campaigns live in Addiliate in all possible verticals. And we’re launching more every day!

7. Can you give me more data about payments – how frequent payments do you offer, what is the minimum revenue for fast payment terms. Do you have a minimum payout level? And what payment options do you offer (wire, paypal …)?

We pay our affiliates every wednesday like clockwork. No exceptions. The minimum payment treshold is 50$ and payments are made through wire, paypal or payoneer. Bank commissions are completely on us!

8. As a network owner, you see all the data on a plate … tell us something about the trends in the industry. What verticals are running strong, which ones are going down, which ones are the evergreens?

There are no bad campaigns and no bad verticals. It is our belief you can make a lot of money in every vertical if you run it on the right traffic source. We don’t see any particular verticals going down – there is really unlimited potential everywhere you look. What we do see is advertisers getting more hands-on, diving deep in the data and focusing on quality rather than quantity. A few years ago it was just about delivering installs (the goold ol’ times!) now its all about quality, KPIs and creating value. More and more campaigns will get (soft) KPIs that pubs will need to meet if they want to run the campaign long term. As an affiliate the golden bullet of success is definitely focusing on putting yourself in the advertisers’ shoes and delivering high quality.

Note by Matuloo : KPI means Key Performance Indicator – this can be a retention rate/ usage rate in case of smartphone apps. It can be revenue earned per Lead in case of leadgen etc…

9. Try to put yourself in the shoes of an aspiring affiliate, who is just starting in the business. What verticals would you recommend for such a person to focus on? What traffic type or maybe what GEOs they should focus on?

It doesn’t matter which vertical you pick, but pick one or two and focus on those. Be persistent, read a lot on forums such as stackthatmoney.com, network with other affiliates at tradeshows and don’t give up when you lose money on your first campaign(s). It’s normal – everyone has been there. The winners in this industry are the ones that keep on going after incurring the first losses. Don’t see it as losing money in the beginning; look at it as buying experience and data that you later use to optimize your campaigns. Regarding geo’s, there’s potential everywhere. We have very successful campaigns in Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, UAE, Nigeria and Kenya as well as in the more traditional countries (US, Canada, AU and the European markets) so here also I would focus my efforts on one or two geo’s and become a master in those. Last tip: never run any campaign without tracking.

10. Many of my readers report problems with getting accepted into their first affiliate network … what’s your policy on accepting newbies? And what do they have to do in order to get a quick approval?

If you want to get accepted into Addiliate, just show us who you are. Apart from knowing your (real) first and last name, we also want to know where you know us from, what your experience level is in affiliate marketing and how you are planning to drive traffic to our campaigns. We welcome all affiliates big or small, the only thing we care about is getting affiliates on board who drive real and high-quality traffic to our campaigns, whether its 50$ a month or 50,000$ a month.

Tip: we want to know the person behind the skype and get to know who we’re working with so including your stackthatmoney nickname, Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin profile definitely helps in the onboarding process.

11. Do you think there are some specific reasons that make Addiliate a better network than the average ones? If so, name them please.

Every network owner thinks there network is the best, so do I 

What makes us stand out I think is that on one hand we stick to our agreements and to our part of the deal. You drive the traffic – we give you premium campaigns, superhigh payouts, regular present and rewards for our best affiliates, and we’ll pay you every Wednesday. On the other hand, what really makes us stand out is our in-house technology and the fact that we optimize the Addiliate platform to the specific (technical) needs and requirements of our affiliates.

END of Interview.

Ok guys, let me end this post now. I would say the most important parts have been covered.

In case you decide to give this network a try, make sure you mention my blog in order to get approved quickly… even thou, I’m sure they will take you on board quickly even when you don’t mention me at all, Addiliate is one of the more newbie friendly networks for sure.

Here is the referral link again, if you click it, they will know you come from this blog and approve you instantly : https://www.addiliate.com/redirect.html?ad=METFLJ26

And here is a plain url to click : www.Addiliate.Com

In case you have any suggestions for this affiliate networks series, please do let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

[grwebform url=”https://app.getresponse.com/view_webform_v2.js?u=06z2p&webforms_id=8162402″ css=”on” center=”off” center_margin=”200″/]